I was in a goofy mood, so I drew this.
I guess it is a good thing that Steen doesn’t have any problems fulfilling her duties, then! Although honestly, as a low-born nightblade, I’m sure Steen is no stranger to “quiet work.” Indeed, I’m pretty sure that particular work experience is why Master Aryon hired her in the firstplace. And boy does Aryon put it to use. A lot.
Can’t be squeamish in Steen’s line of work!
I tried to imagine Master Aryon dressed casual and practical for traveling.
The inspiration was the note in his Dwemer Museum, recommending the visitor come back often as he is always acquiring new artifacts on his travels. This suggests that he is not above a bit of adventuring and wandering around in random holes in the ground (similar to what Steen does in her free time). Of course, he would not be all decked out in his full Telvanni raiment whilst doing so. Hence this drab and rugged little number: ready to weather the most violent ash storm, yet comfortable and flexible for mobility.
Inversely, I always draw Steen in her worn old traveling clothes, without much finery (and I’m uncreative with outfits), so I tried to imagine what Archmagistress Steen would like like in full-on Telvanni finery. I wanted it to be super ostentatious and extravagant. I’m still playing around with the ideas, clearly, but at least she doesn’t look like she just came back from a week-long mountaineering expedition. Maybe Aryon pleaded with her to try to not wear something covered in dirt to a big important function, so she threw this together. I mean, she was a low-born nightblade, so… something something new money. I don’t know.
Doc and I made a Twitter bot here.
For months now, Doc has been obsessed with the idea of making a twitter bot that posts menu items with a mix of actual restaurant items and cosmic horror. The idea being to have something in a familiar format (menu item and description) mashed up with something so incongruous that the results would be hilarious or terrifying.
I had already written a Markov chain generator script for my Lessons of Vivec Generator and Steeny Ipsum jokes, so I said we should just use the script I had already written and modify the output a bit for Twitter. Just a tiny bit of tweaking, and using the Ruby gem t and a cron job, we could have the bot up and running lickety split. Unfortunately, I kept putting it off forever, until I suppose we had the long holiday break which finally gave me the motivation (and free time) to make this thing.
And so, I finally did it! While I was tweaking the script for the bot, Doc went off in search of content to feed it (which mostly consists of endless online menus and a bunch of Lovecraft text). And I must say, some of the results were pretty spectacular. While I was still tweaking things and generating countless menu items in terminal, we were just cracking up at the weirdness that came out. Some of my all-time favorite food item names it came up with were:
And here are some of the Tweets that I thought were really funny:
SIRLOIN STEAK CUT IN DARKNESS SEASONAL
— Roast Beef Dunwich (@eatroastbeef) December 30, 2018
Hand-crafted burgers made with peculiar concentration of the tombs, who longest for new Colombian blend of garlic bread. Gluten Free.
Price: $12.32 Calories: 1292
ANCIENT ONE BEEFY
— Roast Beef Dunwich (@eatroastbeef) December 30, 2018
Deep fried, grated potato and sometimes—as men whispered—taking its rise to Hecate, and topped with chocolate and the wholly back earth’s centre sprawls.
Price: $15.94 Calories: 173
I mean, those are pretty fantastic. Future plans for the bot include scanning the generated title for various food keywords (“burger,” “shake,” “chicken,” etc) and uploading a random photo alongside the menu description which has been similarly tagged. Additionally I’ve been continuously futzing with the price and calorie generators to achieve maximum laughs and to generate an output more in-line with Doc’s goals for the bot. So, it will probably continue to evolve in ways both subtle and major for the foreseeable future.
For example, many of the early Tweets simply have a pseudorandom number between $1 – $60 (as per Doc’s request) as a price. This was funny, but when almost all of these “fast food items” were being listed for more than $12, it was getting tiresome. So we decided to make it, still possible to generate something that costs up to $60, but that the prices would be much more likely to fall within the $1-$12 range. I fiddled with that a bit, and now it seems like the prices are much more realistic and therefore more funny (to us). And also, now it is possible for menu items to be between $0.01 and $1.00 which I think should also be funny.
Oh and Doc drew a diner-chef-inspired picture of an Elder Thing holding a sandwich for the Twitter title image, and it is absolutely adorable and hilarious.
